Relto - saints rowhttp://relto.org/taxonomy/term/14
enWhat I've been Playing: Saints Row IVhttp://relto.org/node/41
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>So, finishing up the bundle I picked up, we rejoin our "puckish rogues" after they've <a href="http://www.relto.org/node/39">taken over their hometown</a> and then <a href="http://www.relto.org/node/40">took over a corporate empire</a>. And SR4 shows that the serious-to-silly transition is exponential, not linear. To recap:</p>
<p>Saints Row 2 starts with you breaking out of prison and shooting everyone in sight,</p>
<p>Saints Row 3 starts with you robbing a bank with a helicopter, then escape from an airplane in flight, crash back through that helicopter (doing a mid-air dive to rescue the same homie *twice*) to steal kit from a military base. (And the sequence is played for total badassery).</p>
<p>Saints Row 4 starts with you stopping terrorists with a nuclear weapon, and ends with (and I'm going to itemize this to fully illustrate just how completely crazypants this is):</p>
<ul><li>The missile being launched
</li><li>You grabbing the side of said missile (and we're talking big ICBM sized thing here) and holding on as it goes up
</li><li>You climbing up the side of this missile mid-flight, ripping open panels to disable the missile.
</li><li>Meanwhile, your radio is full of your comrades talking about your heroic sacrifice and what an awesome guy you are
</li><li>.. while the game plays "I Don't Want To Miss A Thing".
</li></ul><p>And re-reading that, it still doesn't quite do it justice, because it's so astoudingly over-the-top corny that <em>of course</em> you successfully stop the missile, skydive away from the explosion, giving a thumbs up to the camera, to land safely in the President's chair in the Oval Office.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that this is easily the least-crazy part of the entire game. Because we then fast-forward, you're President, aliens attack, and the rest of the game involves you in a computer simulation with superpowers.</p>
<p>No, really.</p>
<p>Mechanically, the game is really similar (you still shoot stuff and take over stores and do plot missions and whatnot), and the control scheme is pretty much identical to SR3 (replacing "grenades" with "superpowers"), But the flavoring has moved completely to tongue-in-cheek land. This game doesn't waste a chance to make fun of other games. Probably the most obvious is the Mass Effect loyalty missions and "romance system", which somehow manages to both parody and criticize them. In particular, the romance options - there's no limitation to who you can romance, regardless of gender, and the dialogue is the same either (give or take a pronoun). Somehow the crapsack world of SR is more enlightened than the sci-fi future. (But of course, we'll temper this with really funny and crass jokes). Weapons are stock full of jokes, ranging from the obvious dubstep gun, or a novelty adult entertainment item repurposed as a baseball bat, but even details where you can skin your Heavy Pistol as "The Captain" (tagline: for when you aim to misbehave). This is a game that looked in every nook and cranny to find a joke, and no joke was too small or stupid to include. </p>
<p>There's no big surprises in the plot (to the point where I don't want to say much because you can't talk around it without just giving it away), but the plot isn't the important part anyway. SR4 is a love letter to the series - characters from every game make appearances. It can't have been cheap to bring in folks like Neil Patrick Harris in for what's effectively a cameo, but there he is. The best part is that they lampshade, and then explain, the change in Shaundi's voice actress, and then manage to make it an interesting plot and character development point! </p>
<p>When I said the game is similar mechanically, I am kind of lying. You still have your cars and hijacking and it's cool, but very early on you will get classic Superman powers - super speed, super jump. And at that point, cars are so very, very pointless - you can traverse the city so much faster by just going up and over. Even evading enemies. And the game just keeps giving you bennies - hey, jumping up to buildings taking too long? Here, just run up the side! That river messing you up? Now you can run on water! The game just hands out powers like candy (to the point that they're often coming up with plot-excuses for why you can't or don't use your powers in areas, because while I haven't tried, I suspect you could get through a lot of the mid- to late-game with nothing *but* superpowers if you put your mind to it.</p>
<p>If SR2 is gritty street war, and SR3 is action film, SR4 is straight up Mary Sue comedy - you're a god among men, the scenario is arranged that you have no reason to feel at all guilty about blowing the ever loving hell out of everyone (and we'll give you a million funny-but-deadly weapons to use while you're at it - "dubstep gun" is actually one of the more boring weapons in the arsenel, believe it or not) and just go to down. </p>
<p>The one criticism I would point at this game is that they've integrated the random quests a bit too closely to the plots. You will end up doing all the side bits, because people ask you to do them. Contrarywise, if you do a bunch of side missions early on (to level up or whatnot), you'll find that when you get to side quests, you've already done some or most of the things required. As an example: you "hack" into stores to get access to buy things, so I made a point of getting all the weapon shops open first thing (mostly for easy access to ammo and upgrades - I'll get to that in a second). Turns out Kinzie will have you hack all the stores eventually, so some of her missions were "talk to Kinzie", "check list to see that oh, I've already hacked those stores", "turn in quest to Kinzie". It's not a big deal, other than it really feels like the game is smaller - before, you could finish the plot and still have tons of stuff to do around town. Now, you'll have done everything.</p>
<p>Weapon upgrades are the other change - instead of levels like in SR3, you upgrade each element (ammo, ROF, etc) separately. Mostly just means extra weapon clicks.</p>
<p>I still have the Christmas DLC to finish, but the Enter The Dominatrix DLC is worth a play, simply because it breaks the fourth wall, walks off stage, and grabs a bowl of popcorn as it makes fun of itself MST3K-style. It's the closest thing to proper special features you'll ever see in a video game, I think.</p>
<p>I don't own Gat out of Hell (the next entry in the series), so we'll have to take a break from Saints Row and talk about something else next time.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Tags: </h3><ul class="links"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/8" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">gaming</a></li><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-1" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/14" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">saints row</a></li><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-2" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/15" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">saints row 4</a></li></ul></div>Sat, 02 May 2015 17:59:48 +0000Allen41 at http://relto.orghttp://relto.org/node/41#commentsWhat I've Been Playing: Saints Row The Thirdhttp://relto.org/node/40
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>So, when we <a href="http://www.relto.org/node/39">last left our anti-hero</a>, the Saints had reclaimed their old stomping grounds of Stilwater, and as a bonus taken over the Ultor Corporation (because, obviously blowing up all the execs means that you get to be the new boss). SR3 picks up what seems to be a few years later - the Saints are now media icons, with their own line of Planet Saints clothing stores and Saints Flow energy drinks. Pierce is now a television star, Gat has bobble-heads, and Shuandi did a dating show (more on her later). Somehow the Saints have been re-invented as cool - to the point that the opening of the game (not really what I'd call the opening cutscene - I'll get to that later) has the gang robbing a bank so that a movie star can tag along for research. Obviously, things don't go according to plan, but not because the actor is an idiot, but because for some reason this particular bank is protected by The Syndicate. Instead of a few bank guards, the place is crawling with special forces and black helicopters and the whole things goes to hell.</p>
<p>You and the crew finds themselves on the Syndiate's private jet, where they to make an offer you can't refuse. Being the Saints, obviously you refuse and proceed to shoot the hell out of everything. In my mind, this is the proper opening cutscene, because it makes a better comparison with the other games. Saints Row 2 starts with you shooting your way out of prison, and then into a courthouse to rescue Gat. By contrast, The Third has you shoot your way out of an airplane, freefall through the air while shooting guys and dodging debris, rescuing Shaundi (who had fallen out without a parachute), realizing that somehow the plane is coming back towards you (don't think too hard about this). You then *drop* Shaundi, shoot your way through the front windshield, through the plane, free fall *again* to catch up to Shaundi *again* before you both hit the ground. Unfortunately, Gat doesn't make it off the plane in time (staying behind to give you time to get Shaundi out), leaving you a psychopath short. You land in the town of Steelport, to find that this is the Syndicate's home turf, and they've managed to cut you off from all your resources. So, you crash at the pad of one of Shaundi's ex-boyfriends, and start planning to take over another S-named city from three gangs.</p>
<p>Let's stop here and handwave - obviously this is setup so that we can restart the classic "start from nothing, conquer the city" routine. But it really makes no sense, on so many levels. Let me count the ways:</p>
<ol><li> The Syndicate controls the town, so why do you even want these guys around? Why fight this war on your turf, when you could tackle it on theirs?
</li><li> If the Syndicate has the ability to wipe out bank accounts, why are they even bothering with street gangs at all?
</li><li> Apparently, the correct answer to "the three of us are stranded in town because we don't carry cash for some reason and don't want to just steal a car and drive home" is "call the homies to come *here* and help me conquer a new town". (Yes, you-as-Boss are astoundingly stubborn and want revenge, but it's still weird.)
</li><li>Just need to bang on this one more time - Syndicate can cut off your funds, but there are *multiple* Planet Saints franchises in town. You can't hit any of them up for petty cash?
</li></ol><p>Short version: I accept that we're wanting to stick to that formula - but it really needed a different handwave. Oh well.</p>
<p>The game structure is largely the same - three gangs plus a Big Bad at the end - but there's a single primary quest chain - you have to do things in order, rather than getting to jump between tasks. Activities aren't nearly as important in this game, since you buy upgrades directly (rather than unlocking them through the activities). Cribs get a major downgrade - they're a place to restock and grab vehicles, but you collect your hourly income directly from the menu - no need to go home. Stores get a bit of an upgrade, in that walking into any store will immediately wipe notoriety, just like going to your crib. Except there's a lot of stores out there - and there's a certain irony to being in the middle of a big shootout, running low on ammo, getting chased into Friendly Fire, and having the badguys immediately turn around and wander off, just as you walk out fully stocked again. </p>
<p>This is probably a good place to mention that while clothing and cribs are a lot simpler this go around (cribs don't customize in the same way, and clothing options are much reduced), guns get a lot more focus. Ammo is way cheaper for starters - so your combat options aren't as limited to "what they're shooting at me". Guns are also upgradable - pistols will upgrade with larger clips, start shooting through armor, set things on fire, etc etc.</p>
<p>What it does do is make money a lot more important - you need respect to unlock new abilities, but you'll max that out over the course of the plot. But to buy the new abilities you've unlocked needs money. Upgrading guns needs money. Buying stores to earn money needs money. So, activities are used mostly as an additional means to get money (without directly advancing the plot). </p>
<p>And the upgrades this go around are a lot crazier, at least in terms of "third person shooter". By the end of the game, you will have the ability to take no damage (from *anything*) along with infinite ammo and instant reloading. If you decided to grind activities and take the XP bonus options, there is a point where the plot would be a literal walkthrough. You just walk through town, destroying all who oppose you. And don't get me wrong - the new system works fine. But I did notice I was a lot pickier about what side activities I did, because there's no pressing need to do them - the game will provide you enough toys as is. (For the record, my favorite is the Professor Genki's Super Ethical Reality Climax "gameshow".)</p>
<p>Now, losing Gat is tough, but you do pick up a few more homies - one for each of the rival gangs you're after. Angel is the enemy of the Luchadores, led by his old tag-team partner Killbane. Zimo is the auto-tuned pimp who used to be the Morningstar's competition until he was captured and thrown in the (kink) dungeon. Oleg is the template for the various oversized brutes you'll be fighting (and helps you kill the Syndicate leader). But the breakout character here is Kinzie, who is ex-FBI until she was kicked out due to a hack from her nemesis, the Deckers. She's easily the most well-rounded character I've seen in the series - and having an FBI hacker makes a mite more sense than Shaundi.</p>
<p>But let's get back to the plot.<br />
Once you're on the ground in Steelport, is roughly the same - you take over the place neighborhood by neighborhood, defeating the gangs. The big twist is that instead of Ultor being the power behind the scenes, all the gang violence brings Steelport to the attention of the federal government, who dispatches STAG (Special Tactical Anti-Gang) units to town, declaring martial law. Basically, think SHIELD, up to and including the flying Helicarrier. So now you're fighting off the last of the gangs, while the government is busily making your life miserable. The finale ends with the government going off the deep end, kidnapping Shaundi (and some other people we don't care about), and putting her atop the town Statue of Liberty, planning to destroy the statue, blame it on the Saints to make everyone hate them. Meanwhile, the last gang boss is heading to the airport to leave town. You get the choice - sacrifice Shaundi to get revenge, or let the asshole escape? If you save Shaundi (and disarm the bombs), you're the heroes of the country while STAG looks like an idiot, putting you back on top of the world (and presumably running two towns now). If you go for revenge, you end up declaring martial law in Steelport and making Pierce the new mayor. (Canonically, you save Shaundi, and the game lets you replay the mission so you can see both endings.) </p>
<p>One final note - the final mission has what may be the best use of music in a game - there's just something about fighting your way up the statue while "Holding Out For A Hero" plays on the radio...</p>
<p>Next time: you're media darlings who saved the city - where can you go from there?</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Tags: </h3><ul class="links"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/8" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">gaming</a></li><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-1" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/14" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">saints row</a></li></ul></div>Sun, 12 Apr 2015 06:00:00 +0000Allen40 at http://relto.orghttp://relto.org/node/40#commentsWhat I've Been Playing: Saints Row 2http://relto.org/node/39
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>I've been meaning to do a writeup on the Saints Row series, but... well, let's say I've been busy playing Saints Row. (Steam says I've clocked 60 hours in SR2, another 26 in SR3, and 8 in SR4.) Let's start with Saints Row 2.</p>
<p>First up, let's take care of the bear in the room - the PC port of Saints Row 2 is *terrible*. Like, truly and actively bad. Cars are undrivable with mouse and keyboard, and aren't really drivable with a gamepad either. Oh, and you'll have to manually configure all the buttons for the gamepad because the game doesn't care enough to do that. And even when you do that, the prompts may or may not match anyway. If you haven't played it, do yourself a favor and get <a href="http://idolninja.com/sr2.php">The Gentlemen of the Row</a> mod package (and the Powertools that are also there) before you even bother playing it. Even if you leave most of the mods turned off, the bug fixes are worth it. It takes a bit of tweaking to get the speed right (and I personally didn't bother doing the tests - I just played with it until it felt right).</p>
<p>Anyway. On to the game itself.</p>
<p>What I like about Saints Row 2 is that it feels like a <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld">Crapsack World</a>, which is important, because your character in this game is not a nice person, and the plot has you doing terrible things. Let's start at the beginning - you wake up in prison, after spending a few years in a coma. You shoot your way out of prison, go straight to the strip club, where you find out that your bud is about to be executed. You drive down to the courthouse, kill everyone, and rescue your bud. This is basically the prologue, folks, and you'll have killed dozens of cops before you even get to the sandbox.</p>
<p>But it's OK, because this is a world where everything and everybody sucks. And that's not just the other gangs that want to kill you - the radio ads are from terrible people. Even the stray comments from passerbys. It's all designed to make you feel.. not good, but for a game about Saints there sure aren't any angels to be found. You're doing terrible things to terrible people for other terrible people, and that gives you-the-player permission to enjoy being terrible. (Which is kinda key in this sort of game.)</p>
<p>The main plot itself revolves around you retaking the city of Stilwater, and SR2 has a gating system set up. It costs respect to play the plot missions, which means you need to earn it first by doing activities around town. Activities also give you cash, which will let you buy new cribs and clothes and cars, all of which give you Style, and Style grants a multiplier to respect. To recap - get Style, to give you a bonus to Respect, to get you back to the plot. It actually works pretty well in practice - cribs are important home bases around town (granting access to money and vehicles and such), so buying them isn't really a burden. At the same time, you earn money by completing missions (which conquers the neighborhood, giving you daily cash) and buying stores around town (which gives you a discount shopping, plus a daily payout). </p>
<p>(Quick aside about stores - the names are goofy, but the game lives it's jokes. You have Apollos, where the clerk says "enjoy your coffee; so say we all". There are several different clothing stores, and each one carries a different line of outfits. (And the character customization is completely over the top; unfortunately they dialed that back in later games. Plus, the Gentlemen mod added a bunch of extra logos, so I spent most of the game rocking a leather jacket with a Psi Corps logo on the back. It's the small things, y'know?). OK, aside over.)</p>
<p>The activities range all over the place, from "protect the guy delivering drugs" to "lower property values by spraying shit out of a septic truck" to "find this guy and kill him". Each event has six levels, and you get a bonus after completing the third and sixth. The good news is that you don't need to do all of them to get enough respect to finish the game (and again, since the controls are so flaky, some of the events are damned near impossible.)</p>
<p>The main plot revolves around the three gangs that have taken over your town while you were napping. You can do them in parallel or one at a time. The gangs are pretty stereotypical, but the plots are surprisingly deep. You have the "Asian gang" The Ronin, which involves a son who continually fails to impress his father, destroying his gang in the process. The "rastafarian gang", the Sons of Samedi, is fairly straightforward plotwise, but has some interesting character moments between the General and his chief lieutenant. </p>
<p>The third gang, the Brotherhood (a.k.a. "the tattoo gang"), has both the most interesting and arguably the darkest plot arc. While the other gangs are pretty straight into "screw the Saints, let's kill em all", The Brotherhood's leader Maero (voiced by the instantly recognizable Michael Dorn) offers you a cut of the business out of respect. Unfortunately, the cut is only 20%, which offends us. What follows is us being a total dick - we beat up one of their guys so we can blow up the gang's trucks, then slip nuclear waste into the tattoo artist's ink supplies to scar Maero's face. They then retaliate by kidnapping one of our guys and killing him by dragging him behind a truck around town. So we kidnap his girlfriend, lock her in the trunk of a car at the monster truck rally so Maero kills her with his truck. And so it goes, until we finally kill him in a showdown.</p>
<p>What struck me about that plotline is that it's the one where we make it personal first. (The Ronin kill one of our folks, and the Sons really treat the whole war as just business). We're the unreasonable ones in that fight, and it's also the one that goes the darkest. It's an interesting choice, especially since it's not optional - you have to play through that plot. (Unlike the activities, where you can choose to skip the stuff that offends your sensibilities - I skipped most of the prostitution-related events, personally).</p>
<p>Once you've cleared out the gangs, you then deal with Ultor, the megacorp that's been pulling the strings behind the scenes. That end of it is pretty anticlimatic, to be honest - but that could be because at that point you're packing heavy weapons, have access to assault helicopters, and the fact that I finally got the controls to work properly didn't hurt either.</p>
<p>Either way, at the end of the game you've taken over the local Ultor operations, plus control of the city, and fly away to do whatever you want... until next game.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Tags: </h3><ul class="links"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/8" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">gaming</a></li><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-1" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/14" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">saints row</a></li></ul></div>Wed, 01 Apr 2015 03:56:31 +0000Allen39 at http://relto.orghttp://relto.org/node/39#comments